This is probably the biggest impact, I just wrote on another comment that this didn't seem to be too destructive but it's a bit more of a headache than it seems.

> Current forks will remain public and will be detached from this repository.

If I'm not mistaken when they are back public again everyone will need to update their origin ?

If you have a local git origin set to the HTTPS URL of the parent repo, I don't think anything would change when it comes back online.

This sentence seems to be about GitHub internally treating forked repos as branches of the original repo to save space (as well as displaying "fork of X" in the UI), and there's no way to manually set that relationship other than the fork button. GitHub would have to manually reset that if they wanted to. (This setup is what allows those fake commit URLs where you use the URL of the original repo plus the commit hash of a commit in a fork.)

If it's a serious enough issue, GitHub staff can almost certainly still step in and manually restore all that stuff if needed.

It's back with 181 stars.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241009043953/https://github.co... And for those like me who don't pay attention it had 69k stars earlier in the month.

Well maybe it’ll take a day or two before they can get someone to restore the stars?

Now probably Github can update the starts in the database with an adhoc query.

They didn't in this case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758

That's a foss tool though, elastic is a for profit company and might be willing to pay money to have it restored/might already be a paying GitHub customer.

And GitHub might have implemented something that let's them restore it after it wasn't possible before, as it's been 2 yrs since.

Lots of possibilities that might change the outcome if elastic is lucky

From the referenced article:

"In our case, however, they refuse to do that, citing undesirable side effects and the cost of resources. We even offered GitHub financial compensation for any resources required. But, sadly, they declined. They have other priorities than resurrecting the community of one of the oldest and most popular community projects on their platform."

Certainly possible they implemented a way to do this over the last 2 years.

Yep. I just checked and the repo stands at "0 forks" and "194 stars". I don't know if GitHub can undo that somehow.

ISTM GitHub rolling back such a mistake for a Microsoft repo, but for nobody else.

it's at 24k forks now

Ouch.

This is even more painful for small-to-midsize projects whose star counts help distinguish them.